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When you are confused, celebrate. In this moment, you’re free from having to know, liberated from the burden of expertise. There is no step from confusion to clarity; you clearly see confusion, and so clarity is already closer.
When you have doubts, celebrate. You have remained curious, and you haven’t settled for secondhand answers nor fixated on a conclusion. You’re free from certainty, the great weapon of the ego, undoubtedly.
When you feel fear, celebrate. You are moving into the unknown, leaving the known world, the dying world, the old world. Stepping into the new. Fear and excitement are so close here. The illusory armor of the separate self is breaking apart; life is flooding in. Fear is trying to protect you; bow to it.
When you feel anger, celebrate. Feel its ferocity, its power, the cry of a velociraptor. Life is surging through you, raw, unfiltered. You are on the verge of finding your song, fighting for a cause with passion, standing up for those without a voice, knowing what you deserve. Anger is related to courage, your willingness to move toward life and protect what you love, even in the face of danger.
When you get lost, celebrate. In every great journey, heroes lose their way sometimes, doubt their own power sometimes. Get lost, and find yourself. Find presence, the breath, the beating of the heart. Take the giant step of not knowing which step to take; a perfect step. Trust the doubting, too. And your path will find you, moment by moment. Your true path cannot be lost, ever.
When you feel sorrow, celebrate. You are not numb. You have not closed your heart to the unwanted. You are wide open to life, sensitive. This old, familiar friend has come to you for help. She is not a mistake. She only wants to warm herself by the fire of your presence, be given a space at the table, next to joy.
When you feel that you cannot celebrate life, celebrate. You are honest, you tell the truth of the moment, your eyes are open.
Looking for more great reads?
Excerpted from The Way of Rest by Jeff Foster
Jeff Foster shares his own awakened experience a way out of seeking fulfillment in the future and into the miracle of “all this, here and now.” He studied astrophysics at Cambridge University. Jeff’s books include The Way of Rest and The Deepest Acceptance. For more, visit lifewithoutacentre.com.
Dear friends,
Only a few months ago, I received word that a dear friend’s child had been tragically killed in a car accident. Although I have worked with hundreds of bereaved people in my 38 years as a grief counselor, I felt worried as I went to be with my friend. “What will I say to this dear man about his loss?”
Then I remembered: “I don’t need to be anxious about the right thing to say. My purpose as his friend is to be present for whatever he might need.”
Supporting someone in their grief is a tall order if ever there was one. How, exactly, do you show true compassion for a grieving person? Here are a few ideas I mention in my new book, Getting Grief Right:
And remember, even after the last casserole dish is picked up, many who mourn feel forgotten.
I hope these ideas will help you to create a compassionate community for those who you know are grieving.
Most Sincerely,
Patrick O’Malley
As a psychotherapist who works with accomplished yogis, yoginis, meditators, and committed seekers and practitioners of all kinds, I have come to discover with my clients just how easy to use spirituality to hide from life – from intimacy, from our feelings, from our tender vulnerabilities, from our unresolved wounding around love, and from our immediate embodied experience in any of its moment-by-moment unfolding. We can deny, stuff, shut out, repress, and abandon our very real feelings of hurt, anger, disappointment, and jealousy because on some level they have been deemed very unspiritual, unacceptable, or further evidence of our own unworthiness. Or, we will act the feelings out—indulge, identify, and fuse with them – believing we are making actual contact, while spinning around their surface and doing whatever possible to discharge the disturbing energy which is seething underneath.
Depending on our specific, historic core vulnerabilities – which arose intersubjectively in our families of origin, as part of a relational matrix – certain feelings were simply not safe to embody, as they triggered anxiety in our caregivers, or otherwise led to their withdrawal of love, affection, mirroring and attunement. As young children, it was an act of kindness and creativity to split off, dissociate, and disconnect from material we were not developmentally capable of digesting and metabolizing on our own. We are wired to do whatever possible to maintain the tie to our caregivers, even if such tie is precarious, misattuned, or ultimately not in the interest of any sort of self-cohesion or integration.
As we engage over time in these strategies of denial and acting out – both pathways ultimately of fundamental aggression and chronic abandonment—we often find ourselves wondering why we are not feeling alive, connected, and truly able to open to others – why things just aren’t flowing for us in the ways we long for. We wonder why we don’t feel worthy of love, why we don’t know in some fundamental sense that we are loved or lovable exactly as we are. But a part of us senses that it is only in intimate and direct contact with our vulnerabilities, in all their forms, that we will know this aliveness and be able to truly take the risk that real embodied love will always demand. As long as we are using spirituality to avoid intimacy, contact, and the depths of our own being – as long as it has become yet another means by which we can avoid our unlived lives – we will feel lonely at our core, disconnected, and split off from love.
As we start to discover the ways we are using spiritual ideas, beliefs, language, jargon, exercises, teachings, and practices to avoid relationship (with self and other), with as much kindness, space, and compassion as possible, we can return our attention into present, embodied experience. We need not shame ourselves in this discovery or deem it some evidence of our failure or unlovability. But rather use it as an opportunity to be curious about the strategies we’ve brought into adulthood to get away from very disturbing, survival-level panic and anxiety. And begin to open our hearts to this movement as the best way we’ve known to care for ourselves until now. For it is only radical kindness and space that will melt the wounds and tangles of love.
Like any defense mechanism, this relationship with spirituality has served an adaptive function and we can honor it for the help it has provided us at a particular point on our journey. And we can start slowly and with a mighty presence and compassion, to allow the protective function to dissolve, to reclaim full experiential responsibility for every feeling and emotion we’ve intelligently split off from, and step into the mandala of integration and wholeness, which is none other than our true nature. As we journey on the path of the heart and that of metabolization by love, re-owning and re-embodying to the entirety of what we are, we weave a sanctuary for the light and the dark within. And in this we become a holding environment for ourselves and others, more and more transparent and more and more translucent to the activity of the beloved in this world.
We are so happy to present The Yoga of Awakening series with yogini and friend Seane Corn, with the first DVD entitled, Body-Mind Flow.
With this three-volume training series, Seane makes available for the first time her complete program for entering the deeper dimensions of #yoga—and discovering our own vast capacities of consciousness,#empowerment, and connection. Each DVD guides us into a unique realm of consciousness—the physical-mental, the emotional-energetic, and the psychic-symbolic—to discover our full potential in each dimension.
Volume I, Body-Mind Flow, teaches the foundational practices of the series. DVD One provides all-level instruction in #Vinyasa flow yoga and on awareness of the body for inner discovery and healing. DVD Two offers more advanced practice to stabilize your foundation, deepen the body-mind connection, and release tension. With precise and easy-to-follow guidance, you’ll learn how to:
– Build each pose from the ground up while tuning into the body-mind
– Harmonize movement, breathing, and awareness
– Work with your physical “edges” to release stuck emotions
– Create strength and well-being—physically and spiritually
Learn more @ Sounds True.com: http://bit.ly/RcUolD
Recently, I had the pleasure of recording The Power Path Training: Living the Secrets of the Inner Shaman with husband-and-wife teachers and shamanic practitioners José and Lena Stevens. In the course of our days together in the studio, I encountered a number of concepts that I found I could immediately put into practice in my own life with powerful results.
At the core of their teaching is the idea that we are part of a vast web of relationship, and that the universe is brimming with beings and powers who can serve as allies in our own unfolding. In fact, in their view, everything in our environment—not only the spirits or totems we might normally think of as power animals, but natural forces like wind and water, heavenly bodies like the sun and stars, as well as other humans past and present—can offer us support and serve as medicine to help bring us into balance. All these sources of power are available to us at every step of the journey.
But the Stevens teach that the key to accessing that power and using it wisely lies in mastering our relationship to ourselves—as bodies, as emotional and mental beings, and as pure spirit. To act from our essence—our true nature as spirit—we must identify the fears and desires of the false personality, learning to navigate the world from a place of neutrality instead of reactivity. Shifting from the reactivity of the personality to the neutrality of spirit is not a one-time choice, but rather the result of thousands of small choices.
Since the recording, I’ve tried to remember in moments of reactivity (with varying degrees of success) that my reactions have an impact in ways I can’t possibly fathom. I’ve tried to see those situations that throw me out of neutrality not as problems, but as gifts that show me where I have work to do, where my fears and desires get in the way of clear seeing.
Perhaps the most powerful practice I’ve worked to do as I move through my day is simply to pause and recognize all the allies working on my behalf all the time. It’s easy to forget the miraculous blessing of just being here—of being on this planet in the whole vast galaxy, just far enough from the nurturing sun that we can survive; of living in a place where there is food and water and a culture which allows some degree of ease; of being among other humans who love us and whom we love; of breathing this air that sustains us. I’ve found that cultivating this underlying sense of gratitude helps me maintain equilibrium when things go “wrong” and equanimity when “problems” arise.
What habitual reactions prevent you from living from your essence? And what allies are available, right now in this moment, to support you in acting in love, from your deepest nature?
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